Understanding UX Design Software

UX design is not just about designing an app, its layout, or a website. UX design is about the whole experience on the app or the website. It includes the navigation, choice of colors and fonts, layout and graphics. It also includes the usability of the whole website. There is a UX design software for every aspect of UX. Considering everything, it answers the question of navigability, readability, likability, and usability. It is everything about the site or app, but it is also about particulars, like loading time. If the webpage or app takes a long time to load, then it fails the test for user experience.

What is a UX design software

Helping the developer achieve good UX design are a lot of disparate tools. These may be specific tools for a particular jobs, and they can also for a specific UX design software requirement. The following are the basic requirements which every designer and developer needs:

— Pen and paper. Some would say graph paper notebook or a sketchpad. Pen could be a pencil, or even a marker.

— Whiteboard, and markers. Everyone in the team has to have their own marker. This allows them to contribute to the design process.

Moving forward, there are other UX design software tools to get the thoughts from pen and whiteboard to the computer.

– Collaboration Tools. These include online meeting tools, conference calling tools, screen capture software and live streaming. Skype, NetMeeting, and Jing are some examples of these tools.

– Mind mapping tool. Mind mapping tools are great, but are not used more often. Some people use mind mapping tools specifically as mind mapping tools. These can also be used as live presentation tools where collaborative revisions can be seen online in real-time. A good example of an online mindmapping tool is Coggle.It.

– Chart and Graphing tools. Visio and Powerpoint, have been around for a long time. Even before there was UX, these tools were already being used as part of the UX design process.

– Screen grab and note taking tools. There is Evernote, where notes can be shared with everyone on the team. Diigo can also be used for website annotation and sharing.

–Analytics tools. For some, website development starts and end with Google Analytics. It gives great insights about a live website. ClickHeat provides a snapshot of the where the user clicks on the web page.

– Prototyping tools. There are a lot of prototyping tools around, and choosing one is a personal preference. There are those who use native development tools which came with the OS or just prototyping tools which have to be migrated to code. This is what the traditional UX design software looks like.

– Graphics tools. Photoshop is still the graphics tool of choice, but increasingly, there are those who prefer other tools like Fireworks and Illustrator. Again, there are trade-offs between the ability to use the graphics immediately and the ability to fine-tune the graphics.

UX design is not just about thinking about something and putting it on paper or making it come alive in an app. It also includes everything to make the design happen, as well as fine-tuning the design until it meets the requirements and expectations.